Corporates are “hijacking” game design with “chocolate-covered broccoli” as they use games to lure consumers to their brands, psychologist and creator of the Digital Nutrition framework Jocelyn Brewer has said.

Brewer told an audience at Mumbrella’s Marketing Science Ideas Xchange criticism of “gamification”, applying elements of game play to other activities, comes from the “corporate hijacking of game design.”

“Consumers are increasingly aware of the attempts of brands to do this and therefore shun it,” Brewer said.

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“It’s seen as a bit lame and inauthentic and part of this comes from the idea that we are increasing our literacy around brands and information and reading the digital landscape to look for what actions people are trying to get us to do in the space.”

Brewer said marketers were aware of children as a target on digital platforms, using the analogy of “chocolate covered broccoli” to describe the marketing tactics they were using to lure them to their brands.

‘With the Australian gaming industry currently worth $2.5b, she said engagement and intention were still big challenges for the market.

“Engagement is fleeting and this is one of the biggest challenges,” she said.

“Intention is increasingly a commodity which is sold in that digital space.”

The Australian Gaming market is worth $2.5 billion.

Commenting on the problems with gamifying brands, Brewer said: “Some of the problems I see around gamification are around the simplicity of what happens in a gamification space. It works on rewards and punishments and a very simple (user) conditioning set up.

“It uses extrinsic motivation (what the brand wants you to do) to motivate the behaviour. It adds the game elements onto an existing product so it’s just chucking something on the top, rather than being developed from the core. And the rewards are relatively simple and short term,” she said.

Brewer also said marketers “tokenise social relationships by forcing virality of interactions.”

She said the downfall of Pokemon Go was a perfect example of gamification and its failure.

“Basically it was gamified rather than game-fully designed and had an unskilled and shallow battle experience,” she said.

Zoe Samios worked at Mumbrella between 2016 and 2019, finishing up as senior media reporter in March 2019. She completed her degree at the University of Sydney in Media and Communications. She's previously travelled overseas for internships, including to South Korea, where she worked as a reporter for The Korea Herald.

There’s a problem on mumbrella with people commenting on issues that they’re not qualified to (as Ashley Ringrose pointed out). Rumours of Pokemon Go’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Your transcribing of your source (The Conversation?) on numbers is incorrect. It’s not 27m users to 700,000 – it’s daily downloads. Daily downloads would of course decrease as a result of the humongous penetration Pokemon Go achieved. There’s hardly anyone left who didn’t download it. Latest numbers suggest there are still 25-30m regular users, with 1 in 10 US smartphone owners accessing the game regularly (Wired). Is 30 million continuing users and continued profitability in an industry where most games make their profits in the first month is considered a failure? If so, what isn’t?

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